JEREMY ORNSTEIN: Speaker Pelosi, or soon-to-be-Speaker Pelosi proposed – after the Democrats flipped the House – the idea for a climate committee that would be bringing back a committee from the mid-2000s. The goal of the committee would be to gather evidence around the climate crisis. And that was all she said.
And after working so hard for six months trying to elect really largely Democrats to our government, our movement – and frankly our generation – a lot of people my age would vote for the first time. We’re really frustrated because I was a big high school Democrat in my high school years, Scott, and I know that I poured a lot of time and energy into like not just electing Democrats, but also organizing people my age to support Democrats. And I have a lot of hope that the Democratic [arty will be the vehicle of actually building the political will to stop climate change. But our leadership failed us so vividly when soon-to-be Speaker Pelosi talked about this committee to educate, because we know we’ve been, we’ve been getting evidence for the past decades.
We need action now and that’s what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – this big group of the world’s top climate scientists – says. They said we have 12 years to radically transform our economy and society. So, part of the goal of the action was just to expose the gap between what we know we need, between what we fought for over these past six months, and what Democratic leadership – what their plan is, in exposing that to both put pressure on the House leadership, to put pressure on regular members of Congress to get behind the real plan and to expose this, this gap between what we want of them and what they’re really doing to try and get people to act.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Jeremy, I did want to ask you about one important goal that the group that sat in at Nancy Pelosi’s office had, and that was to push the idea of something known as the Green New Deal. Can you explain what the Green New Deal is, regarding the environment climate change as well as jobs – creating jobs?
JEREMY ORNSTEIN: Yeah, the Green Deal, is a plan to decarbonize our economy in the next 10 years while creating jobs for anyone who needs one and centering on needs of the communities most impacted by the climate crisis. And, so we’re envisioning this to be what would really be a sort of very complicated package of legislation and when we call it the Green New Deal, hearkening back to the New Deal, FDR’s New Deal from the 1930s, and so one, one element of it will be finding some ways to, to go shift to 100 percent renewable in all sectors of our economy, really in the next decade. Because that’s what this report from the world’s top scientists says that this country has to do to make sure that our world doesn’t go past the reversible amounts of global warming, reversible amounts of carbon in the atmospheres. We’ve got to transition to 100 percent renewable by 2030.
So that’s one really important part of the Green New Deal – is that it would make sure the government finds ways to support 100 percent renewable transition. And a second really crucial part of the Green New Deal is that in coming together to stop this climate crisis, we also want to make sure that this transition is just, and that people who will be losing their jobs – who will be affected by these changes – can also be supported.
And, that’s why part of the Green New Deal is the idea of a job guarantee that, especially in this day and age in this country and especially when we’re fighting something so large as the climate crisis, we’re going to need all hands on deck. And that means if, one of the proposals in this policy package is if someone needs a job is that they should be able to get a job, a federally-funded job to do something to fight the fight, the climate crisis.
And part of what’s interesting about this is there are so many shovel-ready jobs that got to be filled. You know, updating infrastructure, building walls to protect from rising sea level – that these are things that we can, that we can give people “shovels” and help them get to work. And the notion is also that these jobs should be – have a high minimum wage and should have real benefits so that workers can, can live on over the coming months. We’ll be promoting the Green New Deal as a plan to make sure that regular people have a voice and have a part in making it a reality.
